DNR Seeks Input on Murrelet Conservation Strategy

   The Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has a tough job--likely the toughest when it comes to managing its forested Trust Lands. In 1889, when Congress granted these lands to the state as it entered the union, few people had ever heard of the Marbled Murrelet (above).

   The endangered Marbled Murrelet nests in the mature and old-growth coastal forests along the Pacific Coast; millions of acres of this forest falls in Washington State, much of it on DNR-managed Trust Lands. The Marbled Murrelet needs these forests, specifically the wide nesting platforms near the tops of the forests's largest trees, to lay its egg, raise its chick (above), and maintain its population. This means the DNR is responsible for conserving this habitat to protect a species (Brachyramphus marmoratus).

  The citizenry of Washington State also need these forests, specifically, the revenue generated from the sale of timber, which helps fund the construction of schools and universities and local services (public safety, libraries, roads, parks, fire districts, for example). This means the DNR is responsible for destroying (logging) this habitat to protect another species (Homo sapiens).

   We bemoan cuts to school funding, reduced library hours and services, seasonal park closures, and the loss of other services we deem important to a healthy, well-educated, and safe population.

   For Washingtonians, cutting services is inconvenient at best, shameful, dangerous, and immoral at worst. For the Marbeld Murrelet, cuts trees is life threatening.

   The population of marbled murrelets is crashing. The most recent scientific report

 (Falxa et al, 2011) shows a decline of nearly 30% in Washington between 2001 and 2010. Though there are many causes for the murrelet's decline, the loss of nesting habitat remains is the greatest cause. And by loss I mean logging--the cutting down of documented nesting trees, potential nesting trees, stands of trees classified as potential nesting habitat, and the protective buffers of younger trees around them. 

    This is happening not only in Washington State but also in California, Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska where the murrelets nest. Unfortunately, this kind of logging is legal despite the fact that the bird is protected at state, provincial, and federal levels to prevent its extinction. 

    Since 1997, the DNR has had a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) in effect on its forested Trust Lands for the murrelet in Western Washington. And, for 16 years, they have been operating under an interim conservation plan for the murrelet--a plan based on the "best available" science at the time. The plan is clearly not working for the murrelet. The plan is being amended, finally.

  This week, the DNR is holding a series of public-input meetings to help define the scope of the Long-Term Conservation Strategy for the Marbled Murrelet.

Public meetings will be held at the following locations and dates:

June 05, 2013 – Olympia

June 10, 2013 – Sedro Woolley

June 12, 2013 – Forks    

June 19, 2013 – South Bend

 Now is the time to out on behalf of the shy, silent, and imperiled Marbled Murrelet. Now is the time to use our collective power to find alternative ways to fund our public services.

   The Marbled Murrelet cannot find alternative places to nest. It depends on old-growth forests and cannot--as many might want to believe--adapt to nesting in smaller trees or on the ground (as a very few number of birds do in Alaska).

    The DNR is not deciding whether or not to log. They are deciding how to log.

    Unfortunately, the DNR is taking some dangerous short cuts to create its long-term strategy. They are, I believe, not using the best available science to guide them. A 2013 report* by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife shows that on certain Trust Lands, DNR did not follow the official Pacific Seabird Group survey protocol, they assessed murrelet habitat incorrectly, and delineated that habitat inaccurately on their maps.

    This is shameful, irresponsible, and--dare I say?--immoral. The DNR needs to take the time to acquire the  best scientific data and heed its conclusions if its Long-Term Conservation strategy is to be truly long term for the Marbled Murrelet.

*Desimone, S. M., J. L. Anthony, and E. B. Cummins.  2013.

 An Evaluation of Marbled Murrelet Habitat Prediction and Survey Implementation in the Washington Department of Natural Resources Straits Planning Unit.  Technical Assessment Report, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Olympia, WA. 

For more information on the DNR and the Marbled Murrelet: 

http://www.dnr.wa.gov/ResearchScience/Topics/SEPANonProject/Pages/amp_sepa_nonpro_mm.aspx

Vanishing Seabirds...and Other Species

This spunky marbled murrelet chick makes appears on the upcoming reissue of Rare Bird by The Mountaineers Books. (Illustration by Paul Harris Jones). 

  Thanks to the Washington State Audubon list-serve,"The Case of the Vanishing Seabirds" "The Case of the Vanishing Seabird" arrived in my inbox this week. It's fascinating article from Crosscut.com about the marbled murrelet by award-winning science writer, Eric Scigliano. 

   I am grateful to Scigliano for his article, despite the fact that I was criticized for "neglecting" to address the collapsing Pacific coast fisheries in my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet. 

For the record, Rare Bird was published in the spring of 2005--my research being completed in 2004, shortly after the publication of the UC-Berkeley study, which suggested declining reproduction rates among marbled murrelets could be exacerbated by reduced prey availability, based on observations that murrelets were spending more time diving in pursuit of prey.

  I was aware of the UC-Berkeley study prior to its publication, but 1) it was just one study (among hundreds I read on the murrelet),2) the study was based on research conducted in central California (a fraction of the murrelet's range), and 3) I did not feel this newly documented potential threat deserved the kind of focus I devoted to the well-studied, range-wide threats to the murrelet: harvesting of the old-growth forests, catastrophic oil spills and chronic oil pollution, gill-net fishing, and increased nest predation.

Moreover, it was not until 2007 that the UC-Berkeley study on prey species was published--the study containing much of the information I Scigliano says I neglected in my 2005 book. This study--the real subject of Scigliano's article--presents evidence that murrelets have been "feeding down the food chain"--that the historically abundant and fatty prey such as sardines, anchovies, and squid have been overfished and that the murrelets are spending more and more time pursuing smaller and smaller (and less nutritious) fish, including even tiny krill. 

 Thanks to the Mountaineers Books, Rare Bird is being reissued in paperback this September and in my new epilogue I have addressed the increasingly complex suite of threats facing the marbled murrelet at sea. In addition to a reduction in quantity and quality of their prey species, murrelets continue to face the pernicious threat oil pollution and catastrophic oil spills, which are likely to increase in both the U.S. and Canada with the recent push in domestic oil production. Increases in offshore oil drilling, gas-platform development, shipping traffic (including oil tankers) in the coastal waters where murrelets are most abundant put the species at high risk. Gillnet fishing, though banned in California and in Oregon, is still practiced in Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia. (In B.C. alone, about 550 murrelets drown by entanglement each year as bycatch).

   Newly documented threats to murrelets at sea includes entrapment in derelict fishing gear (abandoned gillnets, purse seines, crab pots, and other fishing lines); warming ocean temperatures, changes in upwelling patterns, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, and other climate-change-associated phenomena affect the murrelet's prey species. The frequency of algal blooms and accumulated biotoxins (such as PCBs and PDBE) causes the deaths of seabirds through contaminated their prey species; some algal blooms produce compounds that reduce feather waterproofing and cause hypothermia. Increased levels of domoic acid cause neurological damage among seabirds. Increased aquaculture displaces murrelets from foraging habitat and degrades the spawning ground of their prey fish. Elevated underwater sound disturbance, such as pile driving and detonations has been shown to cause injuries and mortality among seabirds and also disrupt their foraging behavior. Even so-called green energy has a cost: murrelets risk collision with massive underwater wave and tidal turbines in their foraging grounds; onshore and offshore wind turbines add the risk of collision to airborne murrelets if they are placed in the murrelet’s sea-to-forest flight path.

  These threats affect not only marbled murrelets--a federally threatened species--but also many other seabirds. The marbled murrelets are considered an indicator species--they are sensitive to changes in the ocean where they spend 95% of their time and in the old-growth coastal forests where the breed.

  What they are and have been indicating for several decades is that these ecosystems are badly broken and that the future looks bleak for many species, including our own, as we spend more and more time extracting, harvesting, mining increasingly precious resources.

 Thanks to Eric Scigliano for his well-written fascinating article and the opportunity to discuss the important research on the marbled murrelet.

The Art of Bird Identification

Being an indoor cat, Rocco as developed a refined taste in books.

My new hero: Pete Dunne, author of many books about birds and birding, but The Art of Bird Identification is a jewel. A friend recommended this slim volume to me a few weeks ago and I've already renewed it twice from my local public library. Yes, I will buy a copy--probably several to give as gifts to the Accidental Naturalist-style birders who have resolved to become more intentional, but don't quite know how. Pete Dunne tells you how and makes you want to try.

  "Actually, bird identification bores me," is the shocker that opens Dunne's book. "If all you want to do is pin a name to a bird, buy and use a field guide," he continues. "But if you are serious about birding, if you want to learn a skill set you can apply to the identification of all birds, stationary and in flight, near and far, then read this book."

   All the birds? In just 135 pages? There has to be some kind of gimmick, right? In fact, there are no gimmicks, no flash cards, no apps. Just a common-sense approach that relies on seeing the big picture--the traits that unite North American birds in 75 bird families (hummingbirds, flycatchers, waterfowl, loons, alcids, and the like). Those traits include the general shape of the bird, how it moves, its habitat, its feeding style, and degree of sociability.

An illustration fromThe Art of Bird Identification .

We often ignore these traits when we are out in the field with our dog-eared, high-lighted field guide and our bird checklist. And why do we ignore these traits? Because, Dunne suggests, many standard field guides focus on identification of birds from structure and plumage characteristics--characteristics closely and carefully observed by scientists using collected specimens (birds shot and preserved). No one, Dunne asserts, can see the sharp shin on a sharp-shinned hawk unless that bird is in hand. The "shotgun school" of bird identification puts at a disadvantage all the birds like me who fumble with binoculars, don't have a spotting scope, or go birding in places where the birds don't sit still long enough to have their shins or napes observed.  Dunne's book is designed to help you id a twitchy yellow blur in the bushes.

The Art of Bird Identification is not intended to be a replacement for a field guide. Dunne believes field guides are useful (and essential) but only if we understand how to use them. Which, apparently, most of us don't. I find myself flipping back and forth through my National Geographic field guide trying to match the bird I think I saw with one of the pictures in the book. According to this system, there are quite a number of birds of the desert and alpine tundra flitting around the salt marshes of Puget Sound. Had I bothered to study the salt-marsh habitat, read up on the families of birds that might be found there, I might have avoided these embarrassing mis-identifications. Waxwing not Phainopepla. Marsh Wren, not Canyon Wren.

   Perhaps the best advice in Dunne's book is to start with the common birds in your back yard--the ones whose names you learned, the ones you checklisted long ago--and learn "how they stand, move, forage, and fly. Become intimate with them. (There's a name for this activity. It's called 'bird watching.')"

How could you not trust the advice of an author with back-cover photo like this one?

   Thus, I have learned that the birds on my backyard feeder are Pine Siskins. And now, thanks to Dunne's encouragement, I know something about their family, who they hang with, their habits, and their personality (elsewhere, Dunne calls them "The Bratty, Streaky, Little Pipsqueak at the Thistle Feeder"). And I know why they are at my feeder.

On the Wall, Not in the Cloud

3 x 5 cards and painters' tape let me to turn my kitchen wall into...a mess.

  When your head is in the clouds, it is difficult to determine where you are. When your head is in the book you are writing about the clouds, you can get lost for weeks at a time. 

    Lost is where I found myself a few weeks back when I took stock of my very rough draft of the twenty or so chapters of my book, Still Life with Clouds. Though I had an outline, a table of contents, and research materials organized by chapters into file folders, I could only see half a page at a time of my manuscript. And then I upgraded my eight-year-old laptop and found myself battling Windows 8, which played havoc with the appearance of my text--zooming, contracting, closing, hiding, and zooming some more when my fingers merely hovered over the keyboard. I needed to see my entire book all at once and perfectly still.

   That's when I pulled out the 3 x 5 index cards and taped my entire book to the kitchen wall. Every chapter had its own column, every theme or section had its own card. 

   What I discovered in the process was that my outline, my table of contents, and my manuscript weren't in sync. There were gaps and redundancies. There were sections I had edited out earlier that I missed. Some sections seemed better suited to different chapters. Instead of cutting and pasting huge swaths of my manuscript, I simply untaped the offending card and walked it a few feet left or right and stuck it in its new home. And there it was--right there, visible, in the context of the entire book. I did this over and over for a week. With each move of a card, the shape of the book on the wall changed slightly, developing here, shrinking there. Why, it was positively cloud-like!

Like a cumulus cloud, my book developed with each 3 x 5 card I added.

  Once each chapter looked right and felt balanced (more or less), I removed an entire column of cards and laid them on the kitchen table (all leaves employed) and fine tuned my table of contents to match the cards. Once the rhythm of the chapter felt right, I placed my fingers ever so lightly over the keyboard and began the cutting and pasting of chunks of text.
   The next step (I think) is to remove each column of cards again and begin the second draft. The trick will be to keep it all from evaporating.